Oh

She sat alone at one of the brightly checkered picnic tables, anxiously pushing potato salad around her foam disposable plate. The tines of the plastic fork made shallow indents in the dish’s material and extra mayonnaise, the product of an overzealous aunt, filled each rut like rainwater in a tire track. Bits of an undercooked burger lay discarded next to the salad, the bun ripped off and extra ketchup smeared across the plate. A wistful sigh escaped Georgiana’s lips before a dark shadow fell across her project.

“I think that’s meant for eating,” the shadow said, causing her to look up. The sun was behind the trigger of her surprise, its brightness drowning out all discernible features, but slowly her eyes adjusted and a familiar face took shape. She took in the largeness of man’s form, all two hundred pounds of his well-muscled frame. His ebony hair was cut short, vastly different from the shaggy mane she’d once identified him with, and it was spiked away from a pale face set with green eyes. For a moment, she was taken aback: she’d forgotten just how handsome he was.

“Jack,” she said simply, a smile spreading across her face. The smile was returned by the man behind her, his normally serious expression lightened by his pleasure at seeing her.

“How are you, Gi?”

“As well as can be expected, considering where I am.” Jack chuckled and took a seat at the table, swinging one leg over the picnic bench to straddle it.

“I hear you,” he responded with a smirk.

“What are you doing here?” Gi asked.

“Well, it is a family picnic,” he replied, “and seeing’s how I’m married to your cousin…”

“Yeah, I know, but Rach said you couldn’t get off work.”

“I couldn’t.”

Gi snorted. “So you ditched?”

“This is more fun than data entry,” he shrugged. “Besides, I had to see my favorite relative. Your mom’s made it out like your life is falling apart. I wanted to see for myself if you were okay.”

“Well, for once she’s not exactly wrong, but I’ll be okay.” Jack’s face transformed immediately, his serious mask slipping back into place.

“So she wasn’t lying,” he murmured. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing short of the usual. Hate my job, hate my boyfriend, hate my life.”

“Explain.”

“There’s not much to tell. I applied for a higher level job and was denied, Pat is convinced that I’m cheating on him, and my doctor is telling me I should go back on meds. Plus sleeping pills. I mean, really? Sleeping pills and anti-depressants?” Gi shook her head sadly and reached up to massage her temples.

“Maybe you should listen to your doctor,” Jack sad quietly. “I know it’s not what you want to hear, but you’re different. You look tired and sad. I hate it when you look tired and sad.” She laughed in response, a small quiet bark to show her amusement and her disappointment.

“So you’re buying into the pills thing too?” she asked sadly. “Damn it. You were the last person I could count on to still take my side on that.” Jack put his hand on her back and tried his best to comfort her.

“You can still count on me, Gi. And I still feel the way I used to about pills. Except… well, things are different when it comes to you.”

“How do you mean?” she asked, looking him in the face.

“You don’t have any brothers or sisters. You never keep the same friends for more than a couple of years. It’s just been you growing up with your mom and your dad and their ridiculousness. Your mother’s overprotective and your father expects too much of you. I feel like you need protection from them.”

“Protection even though I’m technically overprotected?” she laughed. “Wow, Jack. That makes sense.”

Jack frowned. “You know what I mean. I’m just trying to look out for you without getting as involved as your mom does. That all being said, and knowing that my opinion on anti-depressants haven’t changed, I think they might benefit you.”

“How? I’ve been on them before.”

“Every single one?” Gi looked away. “Yeah. You haven’t. There could be something out there that works for you and you just haven’t found it yet.”

“But even if I did find it, I’d have maybe five years before I became tolerant to it, and then the hunt for everlasting happiness would resume.”

“Okay, fine, but isn’t five years better than none?”

She had nothing to say to that.

“Just try it, Gi.” Jack took her hand in one of his and used his other to turn her face back toward him. “I swear, I won’t say another word if you just give it a shot.” A long silence stretched between them before Georgiana nodded.

“All right. But only because you asked.”

Jack’s mile wide grin was back. “Thank you.” Gi shook off their conversation, determined to flip the focus off herself.

“Well, my issues aside, how are you? How’s Rach?”

It was his turn to look defeated.

“Things are all right. Not as well as they could be.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Your cousin and I haven’t been getting along lately.” Gi frowned.

“Aw, how come?”

Something in Jack’s face changed, though the difference was fleeting. “Just stuff.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Just “stuff”? What kind of “stuff”?”

“Just stuff.”

“How very articulate.”

“I don’t know if I want to talk about it.”

This caused her to pause before answering. Jack had always been a world unto himself, and it had been a rare occasion when he had married Rachael. Everyone in the family knew of his solitary tendencies, so his marriage to a woman who loved to talk about every emotion she’d ever felt had come as quite a shock. Over time, most had gotten used to it, but Gi had always found it strange, like it was the one thing out of alignment with his character.

“I think you should talk about it,” she finally answered, slowly and carefully so as not to provoke aggression. Jack looked into her eyes for a moment before he sighed.

“All right. Just don’t repeat it.”

“Never.”

He took a deep breath.

“I found her in bed with another man, Gi.”

All she could do was gape.

“She cheated on you?” Jack’s response was to nod. “With who?”

“You’re going to shit yourself when you hear this…”

Georgiana frowned. “Who was it, Jack?”

“I can’t believe I’m saying it out loud…”

“Jack. Who?”

He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Ed.”

She gaped again. “Ed Ed? As in your big brother Ed? Your best man?” He nodded with his hands still covering his face and she felt her shock morph slowly into rage. Blood began to rush into her face as she imagined Rachael’s betrayal. “Oh fuck. Oh my God, Jack. I’m so sorry. I should kill her.”

“No no, don’t say anything about it. I just don’t know what to do.”

“What do you mean you don’t know what to do?” Jack stood suddenly, his pent up agitation finding its release in motion. He strode across the grass to a tree and turned immediately to come back again, obviously unable to sit anymore.

“I mean do I forgive her? Or do I toss her to the curb? Do we work through this? Do I file for divorce? Can I ever trust her again if I do stay? There are too many questions and I have none of the answers.”

Both parties were silent for several minutes while each let the gravity of his words sink in.

“Well,” Gi said quietly, “I can’t tell you what to do, but I can tell you what I’d do.”

“Let me guess,” he responded miserably. “You’d leave her?”

Though she hated to be so transparent, Gi nodded. Jack groaned slightly.

“And what if she’s the one?”

“What if you stay and she’s not? What if you miss the one because you’re trying to patch things up with Rach? What if you get struck by lightning tomorrow? What if you go swimming and drown? You’ll drive yourself insane with all the what if’s, Jack.”

“But I need to know.”

“You can’t know. There’s no way you can know until all is said and done and it’s behind you. You can’t see the future. You can’t even speculate on it. There are just too many variables.”

Jack looked at Georgiana for a long time before sitting down again, his spine hunched as he leaned forward to place his elbows on his knees.

“So you’d leave her.”

“Yes, I would.”

“Why?”

“Because even though it’d be hard, I’d know I deserved better than betrayal.”

“Hard is an understatement.”

Gi nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“If I left her, I would need someone to rely on.”

“You always have me, Jack. Just like I have you.” For a moment, Jack looked back at her before he suddenly smiled and laughed.

“Do you want to know something ridiculous?”

Gi leaned forward, interested. “What’s that?”

“About half of the fights we got in were about you.”

She blinked.

“I know, it seems weird, but Rach was convinced I was fooling around with you, even after we got married.” Gi laughed.

“Well that’s inane.”

“It was.” A tense silence blossomed between them.

“But?” Gi finally asked. Jack leaned back from his knees and stretched out, his eyes faced toward the sky.

“It was inane until I realized how much I preferred your company to my wife’s.”

She blinked, her heart leaping to her throat and her stomach bottoming out. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” he admitted, still looking at the sky. “Oh is right.”

Chicken Nuggets

Chicken nuggets were the girl’s favorite food. Most four-year-olds find a favorite meal they choose to eat obsessively and hers was the dolphin shaped chicken nuggets that her mother bought in the frozen section of the grocery store every Saturday. The girl ate them every day for lunch and though her mother tried to get her to try other foods, she would pick at her plate until someone relented and replaced her meal with the nuggets. And so she ate dolphin shaped nuggets every day, with a side of baked crinkle fries and sometimes green or purple ketchup. She always sat propped in her booster seat on the back porch of her house and regularly watched the trees in her yard sway. She could often hear the buzzing of summertime mosquitoes as they tried to breach the meager defenses provided by the aging porch screen. This Saturday, the girl’s mother was in the kitchen, washing dishes left over from their family lunch, and her father sat next to her at the weak-legged iron table, plate empty and tea glass full, his eyes ever vigilant for trains.

The girl had never understood why her father loved trains as much as he did. He constantly carried a railroad scanner on his belt, leaping up at the slightest crackle in hopes that one of the steel beasts was headed his way. He and the mother had bought the family house mostly because railroad tracks ran right through the back yard. The father even had a special room in the basement where he built train models and wired them with electric parts so they could chug along on the miniature rails of his train set, passing miniature people and miniature animals before pulling into miniature stations with as much strength and ease as the real thing. The girl was never allowed in her father’s special room – he said it was because she was too little and too careless and could break too many things. However, despite her banishment from the one room in the house she could never remember seeing, the girl often crept down into the basement when her mother wasn’t looking to spy on her father through the slats of the old closet door that cordoned off his special room. She often found him sitting at his own father’s desk, quiet and at ease, a pair of large spectacles perched on his nose that magnified his eyes to the size of an owl’s with an X-Acto knife in one hand and a gently molded piece of plastic in the other.

The girl was used to doing this every Saturday, after she had gone grocery shopping with her mother, but today had been different. Today, her father had forgone his weekly tradition of model building to sit with his family for lunch, at the mother’s behest. And so he sat, slowly sipping his tea as his daughter watched him with curiosity and admiration and just a little fear.

“Figures,” the father said suddenly, his gruff voice causing the girl to jump. He turned to look at her but she quickly averted her eyes and continued eating her nuggets.

“What’d you say?” the mother yelled from the kitchen.

“I said it figures.”

“What does?”

“These trains.”

The mother peeped out the porch door and the girl craned around in her booster seat to see what was happening. Her mother’s face was ruined by a frown, the same look the girl received when she disobeyed, and when the mother spoke she used the same irritated voice the girl had grown up hearing. “Yeah, what about them?”

“Well, they’re never here when I am,” the father replied. “When I’m at work, I see probably eight trains a day, but when I’m home, there’s nothing.” The mother nodded and withdrew from the doorway.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Len.”

“Yeah, of course you don’t,” the father muttered just loud enough for the girl to hear. She said nothing and continued eating her nuggets, hyperaware of the tension forming between her parents. The father watched as the girl made the nuggets swim through the air before savagely biting all their heads off. He smiled gently and laughed under his breath, but his face became hard again when he heard the mother speak.

“Maybe you should take a day off, go with John to Palmyra or something. See if you guys can find any trains.”

“Well, you see, Diane, I’d love to do that, but I have to go to work and earn this family some money.”

“You’re not the only one with a job, Leonard,” the mother snapped, appearing in the doorway again. “Take a day off and go. Otherwise I’ll never hear the end of your complaining.”

The father’s eyes narrowed. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know exactly what it means.” She left the doorway and the girl heard cupboards slam open and shut, pans and dishes rattling dangerously as the mother took her anger out on something less likely to defend itself. The father chose not to answer and sank back into his chair, every crevice in his lined face brimming with anger. The girl quietly decapitated another nugget and smeared its headless body with purple, ketchupy blood. The father watched her slowly tear the nugget apart and the girl threw herself into the work of eating, afraid to look at him. His face had been hard and weathered for as long as she could remember, and his expression was always one of quiet contempt for all that surrounded him, except for her. His face was a clear indication of everything he felt, and he became especially gruesome when he was mad. It scared the girl to see her father mad, and she could tell he was mad now.

Slowly, after a few minutes, the tension in the air relaxed and the girl could tell her father was returning to normal. She chanced a look at him and saw that he was smiling.

“How’re those nuggets, kid?”

“Good,” the girl said brightly, “but I think I’m full.”

“Aw, are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Positive?”

She nodded. The father shook his head and made a sad face.

“That’s an awful shame.” Her brow knit together.

“Why?”

“Well, because those nuggets know how much you like them.”

“Yeah?”

“And they like you too, you know.”

The girl smiled stupidly. “Really?”

“Yeah, but they’re sad because you don’t want to finish eating them.”

The girl looked at her plate and felt her body flood with guilt.

“Nuh-uh.”

“Yeah-huh,” the father said. “Look.” He picked up one of the nuggets and made it stand on its trail, facing its nose towards his daughter. “Why won’t you finish eating me?” he asked in a high pitched voice as he simulated the dolphin’s words.

The girl frowned sadly. “Because I’m full.”

“Oh, we’re so sad that you won’t eat us,” the father continued, making the dolphin dance on its tail. “We love you, but you don’t love us, or else you’d eat us.” The girl’s face contorted into a mask of sadness and she began to hear the rushing noise that always preceded her tears.

“Please, eat us,” the father said.

“Daddy, don’t,” the girl whimpered.

“Eat us!” he continued. “We want to be in your tummy!”

All of a sudden, the girl burst out crying as she grabbed the nugget from her father’s hand, forcing it into her mouth. The father stared senselessly as she took a second and a third, eating them as quickly as possible. Finally, she fell silent as she stared at the last nugget on her plate. With a shaking hand, she reached forward, picked up the nugget, and shoved the entire thing down her throat, forcing herself to swallow it whole despite the waves of nausea that had begun to ripple throughout her body.

“There, was that so bad?” the father asked, smiling as he settled back into his chair. The girl shook her head but her stomach was roiling. She was quiet for a while before she heard her father say, “Sweetie, are you okay?” She shook her head, putting her small hands on her even smaller stomach and she tried to quell her urge to vomit. The father’s question brought the mother back to the porch door, checking to see if her daughter was okay.

“Mommy, I don’t feel good,” the girl said weakly. She had barely finished her sentence before she felt the food moving back up her throat and she threw up all over the porch table. The father leapt back to escape the spray while the mother came forward, putting her hand on her daughter’s back. The girl started to cry again, only stopping to continue throwing up. The mother continued to rub the girl’s back until finally she collapsed, too weak from her sickness to hold herself up.

“Jesus,” the mother said, picking her daughter up out of the booster seat. She cradled the girl in her arms as the child sobbed into her shoulder, vomit dappling the fair skin around her mouth. “Len, what the hell happened?”

The girl caught a glimpse of her father’s face as she was rushed to the bathroom; his entire body seemed to lose its rigidity and the playful glint went out of his eyes, giving way to a more intense stare that the girl could not identify.

“I’m sorry,” she heard him say quietly, his voice fading away. “I was just trying to get her to eat.”

In Memoriam

“Stephanie.”

My father’s voice startled me from the gentle shake of the cruising car. I looked at him innocently but he saw through my disguise.

“What have I told you about picking your nose?” I reluctantly let my finger drop from my face and slumped into the car seat next to my dad.

“I wasn’t picking my nose,” I protested. “I was itching it.”

“Yeah, itching the inside is called picking.”

“Nuh uh.”

Such a childish remark didn’t even merit a response from my father – he merely slid his eyes sideways, took in my pouting countenance, and turned his eyes back to the road. The day before us was bright and sunny, the leaves on the trees shaking violently as our yellow station wagon flew by. I leaned up toward the dash to watch the dotted lines in the center of the road blur together. Someone had told me once each line was eighteen inches long, but it always seemed shorter to me.

I refused to believe those lines were a foot and a half long.

“Hey Dad,” I muttered, keeping my eyes on the lines.

“Hmm?”

“Do you know how long the center white lines are on the road?”

“Huh?”

“The white lines, the short ones that mean you can pass. Do you know how long each one is?”

My father shrugged.

“I don’t know, sweetie. Ask your teacher at school.”

I paused, considering his suggestion before moving on. “Matt Reagan told me they were eighteen inches long.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“But they look shorter.”

My father chuckled. “That’s probably because the car is moving so fast.”

I settled back into the seat again.

“I don’t think they’re eighteen inches long.”

“Well, ask your teacher. Or look it up. You have an encyclopedia on the dingus at home, don’t you?”

He meant the computer. He was never fancy enough to bother with technology.

“Yeah, I could. But I don’t think Mrs. Johnson knows the answer. She’s too mean.”

He laughed again. “Then look it up.”

“But I want to know now.”

“I can’t help you with that, sweetie.”

A silence fell in the car and the only noise was the clacking of the wheel bearing that my father always swore he was going to replace. I watched the leaves and the tress pass us by, sometimes feeling that the occurrence of an occasional field was like a deep breath of something bluer and less green, more sky and less earth. After we’d passed a few more fields, I spoke again.

“Dad, where are we going?”

There was a long pause.

“Well, sweetie, you remember how sick Grandpa has been?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re going to his house to see him. And you get to see Grandma too. She told me she has a surprise for you when we get there.”

The promise of a gift passed me by and I focused on the former statement. “How sick is he?”

“Pretty sick.”

“Why?”

My father sighed, a weight dragging down on his shoulders. He seemed to age a decade.

“He used to smoke cigarettes a lot when I was a little boy, and now the doctors say his lungs are hard from the smoke, so he can’t breathe very well.”

“Oh.” I thought back to the times I’d played with Grandpa as a toddler. He never seemed out of the ordinary or anymore sick than the rest of us. He crawled around on the floor with me and let me ride on his back like a horse, and sometimes he even let me stomp on his feet just to see me laugh. I didn’t like to see him sick.

“So is he going to get better?” I asked a few minutes later.

The weighted face returned. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Oh.” The reality of my grandfather’s illness sat a little firmer in my head. “So… are you okay?”

A long pause.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Are you sure? I mean, he’s your dad, and if you were that sick I think I’d be depressed.”

My father snorted out an obnoxious laugh. “Depressed? Where did you hear that?”

“Dr. Philips said it to you that one time.”

“And you remembered it?”

“Yeah. It means sad, right?”

My father smiled. “Sure does.”

“Anyway,” I continued on, “what I’m trying to say is that you should probably be depressed because Grandpa’s your dad and he’s sick.”

“I know. And I am, you just don’t see it.”

“You hide it?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

He sighed. “It’s easier. It’s how I deal with things like this.”

My face turned sour. “I wish you wouldn’t. It’s not healthy.”

He laughed again. “Oh yeah? Did you hear that from Dr. Philips too?”

“He’s a doctor, Dad,” I spat indignantly. “He knows about stuff like this.”

“Okay, okay, I know. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Do you at least tell Mom?”

“Don’t worry about it, sweetie. I’ll take care of it.”

The smooth whir of the paved road suddenly changed into the jostling crunch of gravel. My father swung a quick left and we pulled into my grandparents’ driveway, parking behind a few other vehicles that I didn’t recognize. I knew that my mother would be coming later when she finished her shift at the hospital, but for now, it was mostly people I didn’t know.

“Come on,” my dad said, getting out. “Let’s go see your grandparents.” He walked around the front of the car and opened my door for me. I unbuckled my seatbelt and slid out of the seat, my small feet hitting the gravel with a gentle thud. We closed the small distance between the car and the house.

My father held the door for me.

“Think you’ll be okay?” My dad asked as we headed into the living room. I opened my mouth to answer but caught sight of my grandfather’s portable bed, stationed perfectly where the recliner used to be. People surrounded him shoulder to shoulder but I briefly glimpsed his papery face.

I shivered.

“I don’t think so,” I trembled quietly, taking my father’s hand. “Will you?”

Dad’s eyes followed mine and rested upon his father’s dying face.

“No,” he whispered, squeezing my fingers, “I don’t think so either.”

The Cough

It was 2 a.m. I’d been lying awake for hours, kept up by the sound of my own cough.

I heard my bedroom door creak open and looked up to see my mother, old and haggard, enter my room. In her hand she carried a plastic bottle and a metal tablespoon.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked.

“No,” I replied.

“The cough?”

“Yeah.

She nodded at me and came to my bedside, unscrewing the bottle’s cap as she walked. She sat gently next to me and poured me a spoonful of the syrup.

“Here, try this.

“I just took some an hour ago. It didn’t do anything.”

“Take some anyway.” She brought the full spoon to my lips. For a moment, I kept them closed, but her look made me open wide.

“There,” she said as I swallowed the medicine. A pleased tone was woven throughout her voice. “That should help.”

“I hope so.”

Silence penetrated the room for an instant.

“I think you should see the doctor tomorrow,” she said.

I shook my head.

“And why not?”

“Because he won’t do anything about it.”

“He might give you some stronger medicine.”

“You know he won’t. He never does.”

She nodded sadly and said nothing after that. She knew the doctor was a poor one and that I would go undiagnosed for as long as I could.

Suddenly, a cough bubbled up in my throat and I began to hack. It went on for longer than I anticipated, and I reached toward my mother, motioning for a tissue. I covered my mouth with the thin paper and continued to cough, my body shuddering from the force.

When I finally stopped, I pulled the tissue away from my mouth and saw blood. I quickly wadded it up and threw it in the trash. I didn’t want my mother to see.

“Are you all right?” she asked, gently rubbing my back.

“Yeah,” I said, reclining back into bed. “I’m fine.”

Expendable

I know it’s coming. I can see my doom just off the edge of the table, inches from where I lay. I can sense my end just minutes away and I am powerless to stop it. I can do nothing to save myself – I can’t even move.

The hard, cold metal of the table beneath me penetrates every inch of my skin. I am freezing but still I lie naked on the table, bared for all the world to see, and I must endure this harsh coldness that seeps into me from below.

The Director never did care for the comfort of his minions.

The bright fluorescent lights above me are glaring like the sun. I am forced to lie on the table and stare into them, blinding myself. My vision is clouded by little black spots but they shy away from me whenever I try to look at them. Only one remains in the center of my eye, willing to be seen.

I remember when I first came here, to the Director’s Office, newly born and full of promise. I had great hopes then, but I contained a single flaw that the Director found and that was unacceptable. One flaw, one small mistake in my makeup, and I was sent to my death.

The Assistant was the one who brought me to the table. It was clear she took no delight in her task, which comforted me until I realized that whether or not I had her sympathy, she would continue to do as the Director had asked.

For a brief time, before my end, I thought of my brothers, born into the same world as I. I wondered if they contained the Flaw, as I did, or if they made it to that golden realm of which we all dreamt: the Director’s Office.

I began to see just how expendable I was to them, and my heart broke.

It’s been hours. I continue to lay on the cold metal table in the Assistant’s Office, waiting for my fate.

Suddenly, the Assistant appears. She gives me a longing look and sighs before she picks me up and carries me to my death.

Slowly, she begins to feed me into the machine.

I scream, but no one can hear me.

“Marlene, did you shred those files like I asked?” the Director asked his Assistant.

“Just finishing up now, sir.”

Thus I am ended.